In Conversation with Yali Saar, Founder of AI startup Tailor Brands

Branding is important and it can make a lot of difference to a company reputation as it helps gaining customers and retaining them. However, the idea of AI powering branding exercise still sounds unreal.

Tailor Brands is world’s first automated branding agency, an incredible innovative platform which uses Machine Learning algorithm to create a creative and unique logo along with brand identities like Social Media Pages, business cards, branded presentations. It is automated process where you can create your own brand identity and logo without any hassle. Whether you are a newly launched tech startup, blogger or an e-commerce business company, Tailor Brands has built a solution for you.

We had a candid chat with Yali Saar, CEO of TailorBrands to understand more about AI based design, challenges around, and the future of TailorBrands.

1) What was your inspiration behind creating TailorBrands?

Tailor Brands was founded in 2014 by Yali Saar, CEO, Nadav Shatz, CTO, and Chief Designer Tom Lahat. The three long time friends wanted to work together and quit their jobs to test ideas. With each new venture they tested, they realised that too much time is spent creating the brand that was crucial for them to sell the idea to prospective clients and partners.

Tom and Yali, who both spent time working for agencies and creating brands for small clients, were intrigued by whether they could find a way to reduce the time they spent working while keeping the quality of the work high. The idea was shattering the traditional equation of value vs. price that was a barrier of entry for many small business owners and projects.

Nadav, who had over 10 years of experience in computer science and mathematical models, suggested they would try to algorithmically mimic Tom’s thinking process and create a design brain that would work completely automatically. Yali and Tom laughed at the prospects. The bet was on, and at the end of that year, the first algorithmically designed logo was born.

2. What problem is it trying to solve?

We believe branding can make a huge difference. The difference between a small coffee shop failing or becoming a billion dollar franchise. The difference of customers paying $5 or $15 for the sandwich you make. Great branding is more than just a logo, it’s a process that extends to every aspect of your business. It is building strategy, keeping your social presence active and so much more. These things have always required great budgets, setting a barrier of entry for many projects and small business out there.

Before Tailor, there were basically 4 Big companies that controlled 90% of the market (WPP, IPG, Omnicom, Publicis) but could only service 10% of the budgets. Tailor Brand was created to empower ideas by enriching them in an automated and affordable way. We use an algorithm to create the world’s first automated branding agency, an agency that can democratise everything from design, through copy to creative and strategy.

3. How is it different from the other Design/Logo services(except that it’s AI)?

A logo is only the beginning at Tailor. Once you purchase your design Tailor will ask you about your customers, and build out a daily to-do guide that extends throughout all of your digital presence. Tailor Brand will automatically design posts for your FB page, create banners to send your customers for holidays and design merchandise for your next company offsite.

It is like having a marketing, branding and design team all on one platform. And of course, it’s also really cool that we have the technology that gets smarter every day and allows you to to create all of that without any templates in the background. It’s the combination of the quality and product range of an agency with the speed and price of an automated platform.

4. How do you cater to Day-to-day business decisions while dealing with startup challenges?

One of the greatest things I’ve learned during my time with Tailor is that neither myself or no one else really knows the right answer. We are always walking in uncharted territories, and therefore it becomes very important to first move fast, and second, never be biased. I try to encourage our team to “Try, Fail and repeat” as I believe that success can be very random and therefore you need to try as many times as possible until you hit the right spot. Secondly, I suggest that you always validate what you are doing with data, and that data has to relate to our business KPIs. Within the digital space there is no lack of numbers and ways to slice and dice our data. We employ a team of analysts and work closely with our financial controllers to be sure that all decisions made will positively affect the company’s growth metrics.

5. Creating Designs with AI, How challenging is to make a system to understand the user requirements and make a perfect output.

There are a couple of challenges that you need to face when trying to create “creative” AI. The first challenge you face is, of course, how do you quantify design – understanding that every design consists of a pattern and that pattern can be broken down into a linear formula with N variables.

For example, a logo is really just a combination of a font, a typeface and a style. But even after you created this formula you need to ask yourself what is Creativity? And how to infuse it to the platform in order for your design range to evolve and stay with a bunch of formulas that are templates at the end of the day. Our take was that creativity was in fact a popular mistake; something that broke the pattern in a way that enough people like. If we draw a comparison from the world of music for a second creativity is what happens when I give you a perfect classical piece and you decide to destroy the spacing between the notes. If nobody likes what you are doing it’s just a mistake if enough people like it, you just created Jazz.

This is basically the process at Tailor Brands, we give you perfect design compositions and then we let you destroy them. There is a design taking place on the system every second so your mistake then becomes part of a pattern, and if enough people repeat the pattern than it is added to the initial set of rules that created that design. On top of that you have to match your users with the right designs but thankfully there are enough people that dealt with that issue before us with other customer segments. We create clusters, match you with pre-existing types of users and generally know what your taste is going to be.

6. How do you justify introducing a subscription based model in an industry that generally works with one-time payment model?

The idea of starting a subscription service actually came from our Users. Initially, we were only selling logos – so it made sense to sell them as one-offs. As Tailor became smarter, and our clients grew, we started designing presentations, social posts, banners and merchandise. Suddenly our clients were purchasing $5 posts 3-4 times a week.

The whole idea was democratising an expensive industry and suddenly our Users needed to ask us for bulk purchase arrangements. It was wonderful that the products we launched were getting so popular and we wanted to find a new model that would better reflect us. Bundling all of our services up as a subscription was the most logical next step.

7. Whats’s the success so far? What are your future plans?
At the moment Tailor is skyrocketing, we are adding hundreds of thousands of new accounts every month and are growing at XX% rates MoM. We want to become the big 5th, and the first one to do everything in a completely automated way. WPP, IPG, Omnicom and Publicis service 10% of the market, we are going to service the remaining 90%. We want to become the Robin Hood of the branding world, supplying your local coffee shop with the same type of services that were reserved for Starbucks.

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